A Buried Coup d’État in the United States

A new documentary exposes a seldom acknowledged 1898 massacre, perpetrated by a gang of white-supremacist Democrats in North Carolina.

On November 10, 1898, a coup d’état took place on United States soil. It was perpetrated by a gang of white-supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina, who were intent on reclaiming power from the recently elected, biracial Republican government, even if, as one of the leaders vowed, “we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses.” They had a Colt machine gun capable of firing four hundred and twenty .23-calibre bullets a minute. They had the local élite and the press on their side. By the end of the day, they had killed somewhere between fourteen and sixty black men and banished twenty more, meanwhile forcing the mayor, the police chief, and the members of the board of aldermen to resign.

The new government remained in control, of both the town and the story. Subsequent generations of white residents knew about the events of 1898 as a “revolution” or a “race riot,” if they knew about them at all. In the black community, the episode remained a suppressed trauma. “It was just, like, something we talked about on the porch, like a folk thing, but it wasn’t really in the mainstream,” Christopher Everett, the director of “Wilmington on Fire,” a new documentary, said not long ago. Before Rosewood, before Tulsa, press materials for the film note, there was Wilmington—“a massacre kept secret for over one hundred years.”

Everett, who is thirty-three, was standing on Market Street in Wilmington, in front of a Greek Revival building that had served as an arsenal for the white conspirators. He had driven down from Laurinburg, North Carolina, where he was raised by his grandparents, a wire-plant worker and a nurse. In 2010, he was living in Atlanta, working in graphic design, when he saw a reference to the coup online. He got interested, and downloaded a report that the State of North Carolina had published several years earlier, to try, belatedly, to reckon with the legacy of the incident. That year, he was laid off. He moved back in with his grandparents, and put his unemployment money toward making the film.

“I was, like, a hundred pounds lighter then,” Everett said. “I had done some acting and modelling”—his first gig was a Japanese clothing commercial, starring Kate Moss—“so I had a network.” After three years, he ran out of money. An N.B.A. player who prefers to remain anonymous, having seen a clip that Everett posted on Facebook, gave him the fifteen thousand dollars he needed to finish. (The film will be available, via Amazon, on November 10th.) Squinting in the sun, Everett said, “It’s not just about history. A lot of the disparities that African-Americans are going through right now are the result of things like the Wilmington massacre. This was meticulously planned, but for years it was branded as something that just spontaneously happened.”

He faced the armory, where on the morning of November 10th a mob of several hundred white men had gathered with the intention of targeting the city’s considerable black middle class. “Then they walked to Manly’s spot,” he said. (Alexander Manly, the acknowledged descendant of a former North Carolina governor and a slave, was the proprietor of the Daily Record, in 1898 the city’s only black-owned newspaper.) “They went to burn down that joint, and, after that, they just dispersed to the Brooklyn neighborhood and started going wild.”

Everett turned onto Fourth Street, heading north toward Brooklyn. He passed by the county courthouse (the day before the coup, the conspirators convened there to sign “The White Man’s Declaration of Independence”), Victorian houses, shotgun shacks, overgrown tracks, barbershops, churches, abandoned lots. He kept walking.

“Fourth and Harnett, right here, is where they started shooting black folk,” he said. “And then, if you go all the way down there, you get to the cemetery where they fled.”

There was hardly anyone around. Everett turned left, continuing until he reached a park, where six paddle-shaped bronze pillars were arranged in a semicircle. They were a monument, conceived of by a committee of local citizens, for the centennial of the coup. “At least ten blacks died, scores more, according to African-American oral tradition,” a panel explained. “Wilmington’s 1898 racial violence was not accidental. It began a successful statewide Democratic campaign to regain control of the state government, disenfranchise African-Americans, and create a legal system of segregation which persisted into the second half of the twentieth century.” Nearby, someone had nailed a piece of plywood high on a telephone pole. Against a hot, blue sky one could just make out the stencilled message: “1898 WAR CRIME.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the September 19, 2016, issue, with the headline “American Coup.”